Sydney Mobility

I stayed just enough time to see some of the robotics development tools (on board CE robot) and a demo of barcodes a beta idea from Windows Live. The barcode is less of a barcode and more of a graphical hash of structured text. This graphical has has the name QR Code (a two-dimensional barcode). Which of course begs the question what do you get for a three dimensional barcode (hologram?). The quick demo showed bar codes being read, by camera, from a mobile device to input contact information. It would seem like a quick way of inputting business cards, kind of like those hardware devices you used to buy for your computer. Does this mean QR codes or RFID tags should now be on peoples business cards. RFID would be faster but might have some privacy concerns, the advantage QR codes would have in this scenario that the data could only be read by the the recipient.

The barcode made me think that its only a matter of time before RFID reading (albeit simple) is built in to standard windows mobile device.